In recent years, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) having excellent characteristics such as low power consumption and longevity have been widely used as light sources for a variety of illumination systems. Fundamental light emitted from LED elements is currently limited to three colors: red, green, and blue. Thus, appropriate white light for ordinary illumination is obtained as follows: white light is obtained by additive color mixture of the three colors of fundamental light, or pseudo white light is obtained by combining a blue LED and phosphor exhibiting fluorescent yellow that is complementary to blue. In recent years, the latter method has been widely used. Illumination systems including LED packages with combinations of blue LEDs and YAG phosphor have been used for the backlight of liquid crystal display panels (For example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-66969).
In this example of the patent document, an LED package is configured as follows: an LED element is mounted in the bottom of a concave mounting part having reflecting surfaces on its side walls, and then silicone resin or epoxy resin that contains dispersed YAG phosphor particles is injected into the mounting part, forming a resin packaging part. The patent document further describes an example in which an excessive resin container is formed to equalize the heights of the resin packaging parts in the mounting parts after resin injection. The excessive resin container stores excessive resin that is injected more than a specified amount and discharged from the mounting parts. Hence, even if resin dispensed from a dispenser varies in amount during the resin injection, the resin packaging parts formed on the LED elements contain a constant amount of resin with a specified height.